The 1.5 meter solar telescope GREGOR

The 1.5 m telescope GREGOR opens a new window to the understanding of solar small‐scale magnetism. The first light instrumentation includes the Gregor Fabry Pérot Interferometer (GFPI), a filter spectro‐polarimeter for the visible wavelength range, the GRating Infrared Spectro‐polarimeter (GRIS) and the Broad‐Band Imager (BBI). The excellent performance of the first two instruments has already been demonstrated at the Vacuum Tower Telescope. GREGOR is Europe’s largest solar telescope and number 3 in the world. Its all‐reflective Gregory design provides a large wavelength coverage from the near UV up to at least 5 microns. The field of view has a diameter of 150″. GREGOR is equipped with a high‐order adaptive optics system, with a subaperture size of 10 cm, and a deformable mirror with 256 actuators. The science goals are focused on, but not limited to, solar magnetism. GREGOR allows us to measure the emergence and disappearance of magnetic flux at the solar surface at spatial scales well below 100 km. Thanks to its spectro‐polarimetric capabilities, GREGOR will measure the interaction between the plasma flows, different kinds of waves, and the magnetic field. This will foster our understanding of the processes that heat the chromosphere and the outer layers of the solar atmosphere. Observations of the surface magnetic field at very small spatial scales will shed light on the variability of the solar brightness (© 2012 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)